C-Train Princess (with her parents) in Blue/Leah Kohlenberg/Acrylic and pastel on canvas/December 2011

NEW YORK CITY – “Excuse me, ma’am? You look like you are in need of poetry.”

The statement, issued to me sotto voce by an earnest, be-spectacled young man*, seemed out of the place in the cacophonous subway stop where I was waiting. But it was, in fact, what I needed.

“Sure,” I said, a little wearily. “What have you got?”

He smiled, stood up straight and said:

Quit and quitters never win
How long it takes to understand
God is exactly the same to knowing
What it takes for god to have sin
On some account I bet high, you were the same
You’ve been a shooting star here from beginning to end.

Let it be said here: don’t look for emerging alternative arts in New York City in the museums or the galleries in Chelsea, or even off, off Broadway.

It exists under Broadway, in the subway.

**

When I moved back to the U.S. a year ago, from five years of living abroad in Eastern and Central Europe – specifically, Hungary, Armenia and Croatia – I came to New York thinking my fledgling artist soul would thrive here.

I had previously fed it with drawing and painting lessons by masters in countries where I lived, by hanging with artists in their carved out studios in concrete soviet apartment blocks and wasting away neighborhoods, and by doing and teaching art. Over time, I worked with groups of regular and semi-regular students who came to the ateliers I held in a variety of falling down buildings. (One of the more memorable classrooms, in Yerevan, Armenia, was literally held up by two wooden posts planted roughly in the ground. The toilet lay broken on its side, so we ran to the luxury hotel next door when we needed to go. We could draw on the walls. My students loved it.)

I learned that even though I loved teaching, that I couldn’t earn enough money teaching part-time – even with the 40 or so regular students I built up in Zagreb, Croatia – to support myself with enough time for my own painting. I needed to be able to pick up a bit more side work to be able to pay for my painting habit.

So I returned to the U.S., to the Big Apple, to the mecca of creativity that had spawned so many great artists, assuming I could plug into the artist community, that I’d be able to teach part-time, work part-time and still be able to paint.

When my friends who lived in New York said “You know, it’s very expensive and very hard to find work here now,” I pooh-poohed them. I had long ago given up the notion that my work had to have status – I’d do anything, from bartending to dishwashing to cleaning houses to editing, as long as I could work part-time. I figured there would be plenty of students interested in the independent classrooms I’d set up overseas, where students worked on their own projects with my supervision.

Boy, was I wrong.

**

When I first arrived, I loved the energy of the city, but I most of all loved the artistry existing in the subways. What artistry, you say?

There are dancers, musicians, singers, spoken word poets, and a variety of other hucksters playing for a buck. It’s common for a group of performers or musicians to get on a train, announce and perform a quick dance or play a song, and then pass around a can at the next stop.

I was thrilled, and I always gave money. It takes balls to perform like that, in front of a hostile crowd. I loved it. I saw break-dancing, heard flamenco guitar, and listened enrapt as a guy gave the most soulful rendition of “stand by me” I’ve heard in a long time.

Some of it was good, some not-so-good and some a little trite, but it was authentic and real and very present.

Above ground, though, I was having more trouble fueling the dream.

Escape from New York/By Leah Kohlenberg/Pastel and acrylic on paper/October 2011

Though I managed to find a beautiful apartment in Brooklyn at a more-than-reasonable price by New York City standards (thank you, old school chum, Katherine Barger), it was still twice as much as I’d paid anywhere else. I tried to set up classes, but managed to draw only a handful of students (people are busy, I was told, and I’m competing with a lot of art classes offered by prestigious art schools). Even my signature family art classes, where the entire family learns to draw together, weren’t taking hold as quickly as I liked.

I turned down two full-time job offerings when I first got to the city – I didn’t WANT a full-time job, I wanted to teach and work part-time and paint. But I later painfully discovered that the only way to support myself in New York was to take a full-time job. So I wound up in a stupid office job, which was so boring and draining that I’d come home exhausted and unable to lift a paint brush.

The part-time jobs, dishwashers and bartenders and house cleaners, were all taken: I went to one bartending interview to find 25 people waiting for the same job. And another 25 people were lined up on day two of the interview process. The financial crisis had arrived in NYC, and it was here to stay.

I began looking for more meaningful full-time work, but even those jobs weren’t available to me. I was too over-qualified, I was told over and over again, why didn’t I go for an editor-in-chief job or something of that ilk? No one seemed to understand that I was switching professions and didn’t want my day job to leak into my real one, painting.

In the meantime, my own painting languished – instead of working four to five days a week, I was relegated down to working one (or possibly two, if there was a holiday), on Sunday. I spent the rest of my days biking around New York City from my full-time gig to my few students, and I was barely making enough to pay my bills. And plugging into the artist community? I barely had time to see my friends, let alone meet new people, in this city that never sleeps.

When I went to the museums and the galleries, the energy that I felt in the performances under the street left me. I don’t want to blame the institutions, though: this really WAS about me. I was depressed, because I couldn’t get enough time to paint, and when I saw artists who did, I felt even more discouraged.

“I’ve never seen you more soul-killed than I have now,” a friend told me honestly, and I had to agree.

Unless I was 20-something, or had a partner with a full-time job, or was willing to live in shared housing (something NO ONE after 40 should do), I realized that New York was not a city in a position to support MY emerging artist. That made me sad. I like New York, I wanted it to work. But it simply wasn’t.

So I have bid the city, and its subway full of underground artists, goodbye. I’m moving to Oregon, back to the Pacific Northwest, the region where I grew up, in January. Back to the drawing board, I hope.

A former landlord of mine once told me, as he gently threw me out of his house in New Hampshire, “I like you, Leah, but I just can’t live with you.”

Same to you, New York. I like you, but I just can’t live with you. God bless, and god speed. I’m looking for my shooting star that George Thomas quoted to me under the subway six months ago.

*George Thomas, The Apparatus Of GifT’D UnderGround Artist, Iammr.thomas@hotmail.com

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